Legalising discriminationLegalising discrimination
Outraged that unmarried women and lesbians have exercised their rights under law, right-wing groups are arguing for amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act to legalise discrimination in access to fertility services on the basis of marital status.
Recent court cases have found that unmarried women and lesbians have been discriminated against by restrictions on access to fertility services. Queensland is already moving to overturn laws which allowed a lesbian to win a case against a clinic for refusing her access to donor sperm. The federal government has now announced that it will consider changing the Sex Discrimination Act for the first time to restrict access to sperm banks, fertility clinics and child adoption for unmarried women.
Despite crowing about how many women they have in parliament, the Liberals are quite prepared to implement anti-woman policies. The Coalition for the Defence of Human Life, the National Civic Council, Right to Life and the right-wing Christian faction within the Liberal Party, the Lyons Forum, have joined forces to push for the ability to discriminate against women according to marital status.
This makes a mockery of the supposedly principled "right to life" views of these groups, making it clear that their politics are really about restricting the rights of women and reaffirming the "natural" role of married mother.
If this attack on the Sex Discrimination Act goes through, it will lay the basis for others. Women at work, in education, under law will lose even the formal protection offered by the act.
This attack is part of a broader ideological drive to undermine the idea that women are discriminated against and oppressed. The reality is that discrimination still occurs, and women will have less and less of a legal basis on which to challenge it.
Restricting fertility services for unmarried women will exclude lesbians, single women and those in de facto relationships. One quarter of all births in Australia occur outside of marriage. The number of de facto couples has more than doubled in the last decade. The Royal Women's Hospital in Victoria reports that 40% of all women using their services (including fertility treatment, but excluding IVF) are unmarried.
A dangerous trend is speeding up under the Liberals: once an oppressed group uses a law, the Liberals remove it. Women, Aborigines and others will find themselves increasingly under attack when they attempt to exercise their rights. Lesbians are still denied basic legal rights such as recognition of their relationships, and the limited access they have managed to gain to fertility services will be wound back.
We need a women's movement that can defend women's rights against the current onslaught. The legal rights that women have won need to be protected, but there also needs to be a movement that can attack the basis of discrimination at its roots — women's oppression — and fight for full economic, political and social equality for women.
By Marina Cameron